The Central Criminal Court (commonly known as Old Bailey) sentenced a UK teenager on Monday to three years and four months in jail on charges of collecting and sharing terrorist material.
Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the 18-year-old Londoner, identified as Sudesh Amman, was arrested in May following a 24-hour investigation. The Met's detectives located the suspect on a tip-off by a Dutch blogger, who had published a screengrab of one of Amman's Telegram messages, which showed a knife and two guns on top of an Islamic flag, captioned "Armed and ready April 3".
A teenager who shared graphic terrorist videos online and stockpiled instructions on bomb making and knife attacks has been jailed for three years. He was caught by terrorism officers after one of Telegram messages appeared online https://t.co/X9bVWvmub4 pic.twitter.com/V1dbSsqpDF
— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) 17 декабря 2018 г.
"They (detectives) recovered a plethora of evidence which not only proved Amman's criminality but demonstrated the worrying extent of his terrorist mindset", said Acting Commander Alexis Boon, who heads the Met Police counter-terrorism command.
The evidence included manuals on combat training, knife attacks, and bomb making. There was more to prove Amman's intentions: the investigators obtained the messages that he had sent to his girlfriend, in which he encouraged her to chop off the heads of her "kuffar" (disbelieving) parents.
The would-be terrorist also ostensibly shared links on Skype to graphic videos of violence by Daesh, a terror group infamously known for torture and beheadings of hostages.
"Through the evidence officers recovered, we were able to show the court that Amman had a fierce interest in violence and martyrdom. His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home", Alexis Boon noted, adding that among his goals was dying a martyr and going to the afterlife.
